When I told people that I’d be getting a hysterectomy, one of their first questions was whether I was worried about intimacy. That word always whispered: intimacy. As if it were the name of a rare and taboo condition. Or perhaps a curse. For me, it was all of the above: I couldn’t imagine a flush of pleasure without the scalding bite of pain.
Throughout my 20s, while my friends were out dancing, I was on the sofa, curled up with a heating pad. Period cramps became a constant crushing ache in my abdomen, while my attempts at partnered sex ended with bleeding and my pelvis feeling bruised from the inside. I couldn’t even orgasm without a stabbing sensation descending between my hips. I longed for a body that was capable of a rainbow of sensation, not just a kaleidoscope of pain. So, by the age of 39, and with all my attempts to mollify my wrathful uterus with birth control and acupuncture finally spent, I learned that my best option was a hysterectomy.
But it wasn’t until weeks after my surgery that I got full confirmation that I’d made the right decision. Friends had been coming by regularly with frozen meals and to binge-watch docuseries about pyramid schemes, but one night I was finally alone. After the vulnerability of being a patient, I suddenly felt a new sense of power. There was only one thing for it. I queued up my Spotify to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (slinky, sexy music with the right edge of menace), lowered myself into a hot bath, and closed my eyes.
Using my forefinger, I started rubbing my clit with a gentle tentativeness, steeling myself for the biting pain in my gut that announced itself whenever I tried to pleasure myself. Except, all I felt was a flood of tingling warmth. Confident that I could truly cum this time, my strokes quickened with my breath until my pulse rang inside my skull like a bell. As the warmth rose through my hips, it built and tapered into a flame.
When I finally came — a feeling that filled even the most tender post-surgery parts of me with the loveliest vibration — it took me a while to fully ease back down again. My pelvis throbbed with a dull ache that felt oddly sensual, the slow waves of it reminding me that I was free of the razor-wire pain that had gated me off from pleasure for years. I felt like I’d gotten away with something. Though, of course, I was only claiming something I always should have known. I thought about the words of the women in my online hysterectomy groups, a chorus of uncertain voices wondering whether they could enjoy intimacy after surgery. I wanted to tell them all how much better it was on the other side. I wanted to tell everyone. But not now. Now, this moment was mine, and mine alone. And it was a resurrection.
